A job-scheduling platform for parallelising calculations in electric power distribution networks

CART (computer aided reticulation of townships) is a package used for designing and reticulating electric power distribution networks. The system is proven for South African townships of various sizes, but for large numbers of transformers and consumers in the distribution network, computation time increases considerably. A distributed service-based job-scheduling platform was developed as an enabling parallelisation mechanism for CART. This platform excels as a platform-independent job-scheduling infrastructure, which is being extended for various types of reticulation and simulation applications. Results from numerous tests show the system to be as accurate as CART with the platform itself being most applicable for extremely large consumer zones. More services are to be added to the platform to perform real-time calculation and simulation of lightning and transient faults, and testing and optimisation of existing power networks.